Tick and tick. Thanks for all the other suggestions too - have been meaning to check out Barthes (not Fabian (-z) - I bet his books would be rubbish) for ages.

As for Catch-22, why would anyone be ashamed? A book the first chapter of which is still side-splittingly funny 56 years after it was written is a rare commodity indeed.

Well I certainly wouldn't be ashamed of it, and neither would I suggest to anyone else that they should be. But my comment was just in reference to it being one of the classic 'teenage revelation' books that Sick Boy was alluding to. See also: Catcher In The Rye, which personally I wasn't too keen on, but am prepared to acknowledge is me being totally and utterly wrong, having had many people whose literary tastes I respect gush praise to me about it over the years. Oh, and anything by Camus (who I think is great, esp The Plague).

By Paulo Coelho? Surely not. I thought that was the worst book I'd ever had the misfortune to be tricked into reading. I actually felt insulted that someone had the temerity to splurge that kind of bilge on to paper and then ask people for money in exhange. And I felt physically sick that it seemed to be working.

Ok yes, it is soppy and reads more like an extended horoscope but I read it at a point in my life where I was in the middle of leaving everything behind to move to a new country. I was basically freaking out about it but this book reassured me that it was the right thing to do.

Another book I just remembered, The Long Emergency by J H Kunstler. I read it during uni and it was instrumental in turning me into a car hating, anti-suburbia, petro-fascist.

Ok yes, it is soppy and reads more like an extended horoscope but I read it at a point in my life where I was in the middle of leaving everything behind to move to a new country. I was basically freaking out about it but this book reassured me that it was the right thing to do.